The Dreams That Dream Me

from the land of dreams in the misty island. Or, alternatively, from the flat above a shop on the Kentish Town Road, amidst the shouts of the midnight drunks and the police sirens.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

A night alone far away

Not knowing exactly (or at all) what this all may be about... I looked up. A twinkling point of light up there. Could it be that that was the sun? Who knows, I suspect it is impossible to see the Sun from here without some kind of high power telescope. Check out ob my instruments but no data.

I went out on the plain for a walk. The silence. Only the reflected, shifting light from the gas giant, Ahriman, which fills a third of the sky. And stars, unknown stars. I bounced a little bit, playing with the lower gravity. I went back in, took the suit helmet off, picked up the reader and sat again at the console.

I have no memory of how I got here. I am aware of a sort of black gap in my memory, when I try to think about the missing bits there I just end up having a headache. Play music, instead; Chopin will do tonight. Tonight? What does that mean, tonight?

This place is in geosynchronous orbit with Ahriman. The angry colour bands of the gas giant are always there, change position very little in the sky. Of course there is a planetary day and night but they last a little over a week, not a cycle that I could or would want to sustain as a sleep-awake cycle. I can hear myself breath. Turn the music off, try to sleep. Play sounds of surf, make myself think of waves crashing against reefs on the shore. No waves, no shores here. Don't think of anything, just float downstream and let go off the mystery.

Dreams are even stranger. The usual dreams of being chased, of going back to my childhood home which is now unrecognisable and sometimes hostile, sometimes actively hostile. Of flying, or rather floating in a stream which is part of a gigantic, perhaps infinite maze, a system of canals with foaming water, walls red as blood, the sound of rushing waters. Of trying to find my way in a building where there is something or somebody important who I have to get hold of or something terrible is going to happen. Of returning home and finding a stranger with my face and my name, only younger and handsome and evil, living there with an achingly beautiful woman I may have seen in another dream. But he is not me, not another manifestation of me in a different world track, not an evil twin or a different instance of me in the shift space of the possibilities of the universe; no, that is some avatar of the entity in the worst dream in the world, the thing full of malice and power whose glancing encounters have made me wake up in sheer terror, short of breath and panting, trying hard to forget what I had been dreaming.

I'm not in sheer terror. There is this sudden silence and eery calm, just the figures on the screen readouts glowing in the dark, slowly changing. I am alone. The evil presence is not here, I don't think, but I am alone, I don't know how I came to be here or why, or the purpose of it. I scan the radio frequencies one more time. There is nothing, just the background static of the universe, scant company in this long, long night away from home and from everything, just the unseen presence of the huge gas giant hovering above, tugging at me from a couple of light minutes away, baleful and relentless.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

do you know you're dreaming, flavio?

In my dreams I always go back to the house in Catia but it is never the same -it changes over time, grows rooms and even floors, or stories (it most certainly grows stories), takes on new inhabitants who sometimes reflect my current life but sometimes are just a mystery, an unknown unknown, people perhaps imagined by whatever subsystem of my brain deals with those things, or perhaps seen in passing without taking them in, who knows. Or perhaps glimpsed in another narrative, in another point in the sift space.. In the distance, fires rage on the side of the Avila mountain, lions are loose on the street and everybody cowers and looks from behind net curtains as the beasts fight to the death on the streets, ancient police cars with the sirens on look on from street corners without intervening, one able to just about make out a police officer inside the car nervously talking into an ancient corded microphone3. Our terrace roof, full of rubbish and the detritus of thirty or forty years of neglect and a parrot and a dog, has several levels and connecting passages and steps. We look at the street down there, the lions still on the loose, the policemen still locked in their car not daring to get out and face the menace, the neighbours making gestures or signals which we don't understand and which could be interpreted as a warning of a greater danger than the lions lurking unseen behind us. One of us sings songs with a guitar. Not me, this time. I'm rather concerned about what is happpening. And perhaps why I am here at all; I thought I'de sold this house and moved to London over twenty five years ago. Is Isa my sister in the house, I ask somebody. They point to some place in there, downstairs. The sky is murky and a great shadow seems to be forming behind the house. No, not that dream again, please. I need to wake up reasonably fresh tomorrow. Somebody says to me, what makes me think that this is the dream and not what I think is my waking life. I look up in the sky, a star seems to explode and its light break through the murky clouds. It has begun. Again.

I do not add, as a general rule, people I don't know. If you're adding me and we don't know each other, or you have chosen to have a squiggle as an avatar and to be a martyr in the nymwars and have an impenetrable user-name, please send me a note stating who you are and why you're adding me. Thanks